It’s a relic of a different time really. Conceived of when there was still an Alamo Drafthouse on 6th street, when Craigslist still hosted personal ads and missed connections, when rent in Hyde Park was $800 a month.

This book started the way they all do, really, for me. One little page of prose, imbued with enough meaning to birth a world. I was 19 and experiencing much of what is now the foundation of my life for the first time. In the middle of learning lessons that needed a good two years yet to steep.

It wasn’t a good relationship, it was just the first one I really cared about. We rushed to get engaged, just teenagers. Neither of us really ambitious at the moment, though we were quickly diverging. I’d borrowed his childlike inability to plan responsibly for the future or even maintain the present, he’d borrowed from me what all after also sought. Some essence. A deep tolerance for the unhealed who were looking for endless grace towards their condition – a unique and self-destructive tendency to forgive what was never apologized for.

And so the night this book first claimed a semblance of a form, I was in the hot bathtub watching my fingers steam. He’d left, screaming down the hallway as he went, and I’d found solace in some empty action that was more mirroring than anything. I’d known this wasn’t right, I just didn’t know then that I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t know that I was rooted in my tolerance by deep, learned expectations that I be easy to love. That these undue reactions were the consequence of the brokenness they had no interest in mending. That outsized anger was not the right response to my very basic and overdue requests.

All I really did know was that loving was harder for me than anyone else I knew. Letting people in, letting people see, handing over any power over me, was an impossible ask for an outcome I desperately wanted. A hopeless romantic, a poet, a pisces, a day dreamer, hoping to god that every man might be the one – watching them file past and out of my life from behind the open cage door I jailed myself in. That wasn’t my fault either. And the reason this book didn’t see the light of day until I was 32 was because I needed to learn that lesson also.

I have never been harder to love, and I have never been worse at it, I have been trained to believe that love comes with conditions. That my service is my value and my needs are a tax. And I spent a large amount of my life walking over the coals to understand what love is supposed to feel like. The extra years, the five I spent in editing, were the years I cooled from that big red giant into the steady brown dwarf that might exist without drama for decades – the ones where I finally, finally, realized that I have had the wrong goals all along.

Painful lessons, 13 long years of them. This book grew up with me, and become a record of sorts, something almost biblical, in how it plots the path of my course. There are things more important than happy endings and there are stories more worth telling. For anyone who has found love to be remarkably painful, tremendously unsafe, and disproportionately terrifying, this story is for us. A love story just as beautiful as all the others that look breathless, and doe-eyed, and perfectly aligned.

For the anxiously attached saboteurs, the profoundly tolerant caged animals, the unlucky in love, and the ones who must learn over and over again: Non-Millionaire Seeking Soulmate will be yours, and mine, on April 18th. This sophomore novel, perhaps the most important one I will ever write, will finally, finally get the life it demanded, 10 long years after the life that spawned it died.